Dream openSUSE Initiative

It has been an interesting journey working with artwork on openSUSE this time. I am happy to report that Marcus Moeller's "Lightray" design received the most votes on our poll and his design will be the default wallpaper on the next openSUSE 12.2. At the same time two of my own designs will also be part of the release Chameleon 2 and Chameleon 3. Also, one of our new artists, Lars Gardmo who contributed a few wallpapers will have one of his designs added to the distribution. I am so happy for the response we received from our members and people who love openSUSE. To all of them thank you.

I am here today to discuss a new initiative from the artwork team. We call it the "Dream openSUSE" initiative. The idea behind it being to collect information from our users as to how they interact with the desktop environments that openSUSE provides. It is not a matter of "I like KDE or Gnome better than others," but rather it is a way for our team to understand how much we tweak and change our desktop environments to meet our needs. You can find the submission page here. Some of us also have a vision of what we would like openSUSE to look or behave like. In those cases you can create a desktop mockup and then turn it in, explaining why you want a particular change on the desktop. If you want to create mockups, a good tool is cacoo.com. They can sign you in with your Google account and you can also export your designs.

For the most part, our friends have posted screenshots of their desktops highlighting the little changes they have made to make their desktops work better for them. There are a couple of good tools that can help you achieve this, ksnapshot and shutter.

Either way, we are calling everyone who want to collaborate in this research proposal to submit mockups or screenshots to show us the way they interact with their graphical interfaces. Show us the changes you make, show us the system settings on KDE or Gnome if necessary, but the more we receive, the more we understand about how we can make openSUSE's graphical environments better for everyone.